How do you propose stopping it?

The people who propose “age gating” social media are essentially advocating the end of Internet anonymity and privacy for us all. After all, you can’t effectively determine one users age or identity without collecting them all.

Is removing digital privacy really something we want to be flirting with? Especially in the era of Palantir, Flock, and the Trump Administration?

Democracy, freedom of speech, and privacy are all related.

Without privacy, one can’t have freedom of speech because bad actors and authoritarians in power can and will silence critics. Without freedom of speech, one can’t live in a democracy, because having the ability to organize and speak out against those in power without fear of persecution is the basis of democracy.

Maybe I’m just more cynical than most, but I don’t see the elimination of all privacy on the Internet as a good solution for something that can otherwise be managed by basic parenting and personal agency.

We are fools if we willingly give the corporate oligarchs that control mainstream social media (and, by extension, Trump) our full real identities in a futile attempt to “think about the children”.

Not just Americans.

I’m starting to wonder what percentage of the human population is even capable of learning from example.

While I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, the only peaceful outcome I can see is actually just a continuation of the status quo, where mainland China uses “reunification” messaging as little more than a show of strength and patriotic political rhetoric, and where the Western world continues to treat Taiwan’s independence with “strategic ambiguity” while hinting to China that any attempt to take Taiwan will be met with a large scale Western response from the US and allies.

I do think that the West wants Russia’s attempted invasion of Ukraine to be a sign of what China should expect if they were to attempt to annex Taiwan. It won’t be easy, it’ll throw trade and supply chains into absolute chaos, and it’ll be met with harsh economic sanctions and large weapons deals at the very least. The West wants China to feel that there is very little upside to attacking Taiwan, and that it’s much more reasonable to maintain the status quo (though arguably, tariffs and trade wars needlessly remove some of the US’s economic leverage over China).

Rhetoric aside, how much chaos and bloodshed is China really willing to tolerate just for the pyrric victory of finishing what Mao started almost a century ago?

I think the main hope for peace is that Xi and the ruling members of the CCP feel that it’s in their personal best interest to talk a big game while doing the bare minimum to disrupt the systems that they currently benefit from.

No. Generally I don’t do things that I feel are wrong or unethical, and I know that there are plenty of people doing bad things in society right now and that I’m not one of them.

Alright, I’ve changed my description to “peer-to-peer”.

So far, I’ve tried and enjoyed:

• Mastodon, a twitter-like microblogging platform
• Peertube, a peer-to-peer youtube-like video posting and streaming platform
• Pixelfed, an instagram-like image sharing platform
• Matrix, a federated IRC-style chatroom protocol (not really fediverse/activitypub, but still interesting)
• Wafrn, a tumblr-like with support for Bluesky’s AT protocol too!
• Misskey, a unqiue social platform with lots of features, very popular with the Japanese art crowd
• Mbin, another reddit-like with lots of interesting features and a nice interface.

And there are still plenty more that I haven’t really tried yet! The fediverse is pretty huge!

As for recommending specific sites, that’s a bit harder since it’s healthy that not everybody is on the same server. So I would just recommend picking a reasonably popular server with open registration.

This is kind of the fundamental question of philosophy, right…? How should we live? What is the meaning and purpose of live? What constitutes a good live?

For me, I take a somewhat existentialist approach to life. I think we have to find subjective meaning and value in an inherently absurd and chaotic world, full of too many people who same to only care about themselves. Corruption, religion, politics, cults, corporations, money, conspiracy, lies, bullshit, random acts of violence and hate–all of these things are so senseless and arbitrary, we’d go crazy trying to make sense of it all.

So I choose to value my family, friends, art, music, hanging out, eating good food, chilling out, using open technology to benefit my life, as well as living virtuously as part of trying to be part of a good society.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Personally I think a bit of lewdness should be expected by anyone who is familiar with the source material and Shirow Masamune. After all, this is a guy who has spent a big part of his career drawing semi-erotic illustrations, so it’s fine for GitS to be at least a little bit sexy.

As a fan of both Ghost in the Shell and Science Saru, I really hope this is good.

GitS is one of those series where I don’t feel like there’s a perfect or definitive version–each manga, movie and show has its own strengths and weaknesses on display, and they all indirectly contribute to a bigger picture of what the world and characters are all about.

My hope and expectation for this new show is simply that it adds its own contribution while doing justice to the characters, exploring the series’ themes as they relate to today, and telling an interesting story that’s fun to watch.

I’m not 100% sold on the look yet myself, but to be fair, I think they’re really at least trying to channel the look of the original manga by Shirow Masamune, which I think had a lot more cartooniness and eroticism in it than what was depicted in Oshii’s movies or Kamiyama’s series.

It’s not as well executed in my opinion, but I’d say they’re going for something along the lines of

mbin

The company that said not to call it slop like a month ago, right?

They’re not promising not to go down the AI path, they’re just trying to say that their AI isn’t gonna be “slop”, when it most certainly is. They just don’t get it

Sounds like a twat.

We must protect little Billy from seeing tits, so he can keep laser focus on preparing for the next school shooting.

If it doesn’t have an algorithm aren’t you responsible for what you’re seeing?

I see your local profile here on fedia with no contact. When I try to click though I get a https warning. I don’t have the app though…

Here we go again, tariff schizo 2026 edition.

It means that information propagates extremely easily.

Sounds like you’ve just answered your question about why privacy is important.

Information doesn’t “want” anything, you’re personifying a concept.

I’ll not sure Spencer had been doing a great job, but this feels incredibly abrupt and makes me wonder if Xbox’s next generation hardware plans are cancelled in favor of a software and AI approach. The new CEO being an AI suit makes me think they want to take shit it a very different direction.